🔗 The Theory of American Decline

🔗 United States 🔗 Economics 🔗 Politics

American decline is a term used by various analysts to describe the diminishing power of the United States geopolitically, militarily, financially, economically, socially, and in health and the environment. There has been a debate between declinists, those who believe America is in decline, and exceptionalists, those who feel America is immortal.

Some analysts say that the U.S. was in decline long before Donald Trump ran for presidency; becoming the first presidential candidate to promote the idea that the U.S. was in decline. While others suggest the decline either stems from or has accelerated with Trump's foreign policy and the "country’s ongoing withdrawal from the global arena." According to Noam Chomsky, America's decline started at the end of WWII, dismissing the "remarkable rhetoric of the several years of triumphalism in the 1990s" as "mostly self-delusion".

Gallup's pollsters recently reported that worldwide approval of U.S. leadership has plunged from 48% in 2016 to a record low of 30% in 2018, in part due to the increasingly isolationist stances of Donald Trump. This drop places the U.S. a notch below China's 31% and leaving Germany as the most popular power with an approval of 41%. Michael Hudson describes financial pillar as paramount, resulting from bank-created money with compound interest and the inbuilt refusal to forgive debts as the fatal flaw.

China's challenging the U.S. for global predominance constitutes the core issue in the debate over the American decline.